Body weight management and dilemmas of health responsibility for vulnerable groups in the changing Danish welfare state: a comparative case analysis

Abstract

This article explores how health responsibility in relation to body weight management is institutionally enacted in three welfare institutions in the interplay between traditional ‘social interventionist’ welfare and ‘non-interfering’ neoliberal ideology. The analysis asks how citizens of non-Western origin at different life stages are positioned within, and navigate, opposing ideological value systems, and adapt to, or resist, institutionally constructed ‘health subjectivities’. The cross-case analysis shows that as people grow older, the institutional requirement to adapt to neoliberal norms of individual responsibility increases, but that in all three settings health responsibility is ambiguously distributed and enacted among welfare state agencies and citizens, and that this renders children, youths and parents vulnerable in different ways. We identify how marginalised citizens are constituted by, but also resist, neoliberal health promotion policies as welfare policy moves away from universalism and towards targeting in Denmark, which appears to increase health inequalities along socio-economic and ethnic lines.